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Weak XXIV

11 June 2020

No. 3,762 (cartoon)

Don’t worry; it’s a good dog.

How can you be so certain?

It’s dead.

12 June 2020

New Equipment?

I recently ran across this exchange between two cartoon characters:

“If you added up what all this equipment cost, it would be in the thousands of dollars. And if I’m being honest, we’re not much better as musicians than we were before we had all this stuff. What does that say to you?” Hector asked.

“We need to buy some new equipment?” replied Jeremy.

I didn’t find the comic strip, written by Jerry Scott and illustrated by Jim Borgman, the least bit amusing. Jokes are never funny when they hit too close to home.

13 June 2020

Set for Life

I just saw Jorge for the first time in over twenty years, and he’s still as miserable as ever. In the previous millennium he suffered from an undisclosed childhood trauma, as if he’d seen something nasty in the woodshed visiting Cold Comfort Farm. Perhaps he did; one doesn’t ask about such things, so this one didn’t.

I gently asked him if the incident that haunted him years ago was behind him, and he said that it was and it wasn’t. He could no longer recall the nightmare he was trying to forget, but now he was upset because he kept trying and failing to remember why he was so anguished and tortured in the first place.

Jorge’s not very old; if he’s lucky he’ll live long enough to recall the source of his agony and go through the ordeal of forgetting it then trying to recollect it again.

I’m no fortuneteller, but Jorge is set for life.

14 June 2020

Real (Estate) Theatre

Seymor is anxious about the real estate situation for reasons that have nothing to do with money. The folks next door are selling their house, and he’s worried about who may be moving in: will they be his new best friends or the demon neighbors from the bowels of Hades?

As a result, I just got an acting assignment. That almost never happens for the most obvious of reasons: I’m not an actor. (Meanwhile, all the real actors are among the forty million Americans without a job; that’s just the way that life works.) (I hate to brag, but that’s not going to stop me from doing just that: I haven’t had a job job in decades.)

My role: the cretinous knuckle-dragger you don’t want living next door.

My wardrobe: scruffy underwear, a dirty t-shirt with food stains, and filthy slippers.

My props: a bottle of cheap whiskey, a fake crack pipe, and Lolly. (Lolly is a massive pitbull with a studded leather collar and a heavy chain for a leash who’s also a slobbering marshmallow of a nice dog.)

We spent the afternoon in his living room talking and sipping whiskey. (I’m a method actor, so it was the real, cheap thing.) When he liked one of the potential buyers who showed up he’d go out and greet them with a tray of cookies. When an undesirable prospect came by, Lolly and I would stumble out with me holding the whiskey bottle in one hand and the crack pipe in the other and yelling, “Welcome to the ’hood, homie!”

No one’s bought the house yet, so Seymor doesn’t know if our bit of crappy theatre worked. As for me, I was transformed by my role: I never realized how pleasant it is to walk around in underwear all day. I really must do that more often.

15 June 2020

Jean Cocteau’s Amazing Day

This is the fifteenth day of June, time to again observe Jean Cocteau’s Amazing Day. It’s a joyous celebration of his profound and timeless insight, “Stupidity is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become.”

I agree with my old mentor Jean, but there’s only so far one imbecile's stupidity can go. If you want to plumb the idiotic depths of brainlessness, you need to assemble a team of dolts and drones working toward the same mind-numbingly idiotic goal.

Peter Browngardt, the executive producer and showrunner (showrunner?) of “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” did just that. He started with a safe premise: take something that’s virtually perfect and fuck it up, kind of like drawing a mustache on Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. (Oops, nevermind, that was of course a great idea and thus a bad example.)

He started by “reimagining” two of Warner Bros.’s—back off, pesky pedants; that’s how it was printed in the goddamned New York Times—most dynamic characters, Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam. He stripped them of their firearms and thus their carefully-cultivated identities.

Yep, that’s right; Browngardt’s squad of animators has produced a parody of the great work of previous generations by stealing the cartoon characters’ guns. By setting a positive example for today’s youth, the gang members of tomorrow will pillage and murder using scythes and dynamite (these are the currently approved weapons) instead of shotguns and pistols.

In doing so, Browngardt et al have robbed Yosemite Sam of the best lines on his résumé. “I’m the hootin’est, tootin’est, shootin’est, bob-tail wildcat in the west!” “I’m the fastest gun north, south, east, aaaaaaaand west of the Pecos!”

As Bugs hisself would say, “What a maroon!”

16 June 2020

Sticks and Stones and Gravity

On Monday, Indian and Chinese troops confronted each other on a steep mountain ridge in the Himalayas near their disputed border. The conflict concluded without either side firing a single shot. It also ended with dozens of dead soldiers.

The soldiers were unarmed, so they expressed their mutual animosity as they might have done many centuries ago: with fists, rocks, and, in an innovative move, iron bars. The mêlée sounded like a cross between a prison yard brawl and a Bollywood action flick. Gravity proved to be the most effective weapon; simply pushing someone off an icy precipice into a deep ravine was much more effective than the Neanderthal’s sticks and stones.

There’s nothing amusing or enlightened about warfare, yet I was struck that two countries that spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on weapons fought a brutal battle without guns, let alone bombs, missiles, and laser-guided anythings.

Some might call the return to primitive tribal warfare deëvolution; others may see it as a glimpse of humanity’s future. And as for me? I agree.

17 June 2020

Rodney’s Myriad Concerns

“I have some concerns I’m concerned about,” Rodney confided.

“If you weren’t concerned, then they wouldn’t be concerns, would they?” I asked.

“No,” he replied, “I also have some concerns I’m not concerned about.”

“I should think that’s impossible,” I countered.

“That’s one of the things I’m rather concerned about,” he admitted.

From there, the conversation devolved deeper and deeper into pointlessdom, but I, for one, was unconcerned about such silliness. What’s the point?

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©2020 David Glenn Rinehart